At a recent ceremony in Vichy, France, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, a short, elegant man stepped out of the crowd to lay a wreath at a monument to the victims. He listened as students spoke of the threatened peace, the defense of French values, and the fascist scourge that led to Hitler's gas chambers.
That seemingly unremarkable man is Senator Claude Malure, who has become a sworn European enemy of United States President Donald Trump. In his scathing speeches, which have been viewed tens of millions of times, Malure describes Trump as an “inflammable emperor” and claims that “never before has anyone trampled on the Constitution so much.”
Brutally direct and fueled by what he sees as a presidential assault on key checks and balances in the US, Malure compared Trump to two tyrannical Roman emperors, Nero and Caligula. But he added that while Caligula appointed his own horse as consul, “at least that horse didn’t do anyone any harm.”
Malure, a 75-year-old retired doctor with a center-right leaning, was mayor of Vichy for 28 years, until 2017. The city in central France is a symbol of the country's wartime shame. From 1940 to 1944, it was the capital of the regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who collaborated with Nazi Germany in deporting some 76.000 Jews to Nazi death camps.
So it was natural to ask him whether the Vichy past had inspired his determined fight against what he saw as America’s slide toward tyranny. “You know, people still come here expecting to see men with little Hitler mustaches,” Mr. Malure said. “The so-called Vichy regime should be called the regime of the French State or the Pétain regime. When I took office here, I was already against totalitarianism with all my being—whether of the right or the left.”
The term “Higher” has long served as a convenient shorthand to avoid direct criminal responsibility for France, whose “soul” was supposedly transferred to General Charles de Gaulle and his Free French during the years of Nazi collaboration. It was not until 1995 that former President Jacques Chirac broke with this ambiguity, saying that the “criminal madness” of those years was “aided by the French, by the French state.”
Mr. Malure, precise and direct, his bluntness tempered by a smooth manner, has no patience for such obfuscations. His political philosophy was shaped, and still is, by the atrocities and suffering he witnessed as a young doctor in Asia and other parts of the developing world.
In the 1971s, he worked for Doctors Without Borders, a Nobel Prize-winning charity founded in XNUMX to provide aid and medical care to those in need in war zones. The experience shattered his illusions about the left.
These illusions took shape during the 1968s. He abandoned medical textbooks to read half of Marx and all of Trotsky in a few weeks in XNUMX, as student protests shook Paris. “We were all in the streets saying, ‘Enough!’” he said. “Enough of what – nobody knew! But that didn’t matter. The time had come for change, for revolution.”
Confronting the refugee camps in Laos and Vietnam, the killing fields under Pol Pot's communist dictatorship in Cambodia, the extreme poverty of India, and the disasters caused by Marxist economics - put an end to all of that.
“I became a militant anti-communist because of what I saw, which no one in France believed at the time,” he said. “When François Mitterrand invited communists into his government in 1981, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it was unthinkable to me - it was a final break.”
Known for not mincing his words, Malure described Mitterrand - who expressed admiration for Pétain and briefly served as a low-ranking official in the Vichy government before joining the Resistance and becoming a socialist politician - as "the greatest falsifier of our history, including his own."
Mr. Malure's personal history, before he took on the role of mocking chief critic of Donald Trump's "chronic self-indulgence" and "ignorant vanity," had multiple chapters.
The American people are facing one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century, a challenge equal to that faced by the French in 1940, when they had to decide whether to join the Resistance or not, Malure said.
Those chapters include several years of managing Doctors Without Borders; serving as Secretary of State for Human Rights in Jacques Chirac's government, in a newly created position, from 1986 to 1988; founding one of France's first health information portals in 2000 (he says he sold the shares too early); and a roughly twelve-year term in the Senate, where he now leads the center-right Independents group.
“He is intriguing, reserved, with a directness that sometimes verges on arrogance,” said Mathieu Perino, editor-in-chief of La Montagne in Vichy, a local newspaper. “Great authority, gentlemanly courtesy, sharpness, a touch of malice, wisdom gleaned from a thousand lives and the precision of a sniper.”
Malure, who went bald before he was 30, has long sported an ear-to-ear mustache, which he has shed in recent years, revealing a face as chiseled as his statements. His “dismantling” of Trump in early March, which quickly went viral online, lasted just eight minutes.
“He is obsessed with coherence and, once he grasps a topic, he doesn’t let go until he has shaken it to the core,” said Frederic Aguilera, Malure’s successor as mayor of Vichy.
Marie-Bénédicte Renard, an associate of both the former mayor and Aguilera, said Mr. Malure was “very reserved and at the same time very passionate, with a strong work ethic.”
Today's Viši reflects this orientation. It is a city that has experienced a rebirth. The famous spa resort has been renovated, the banks of the Alija River have been landscaped with promenades and pedestrian paths. Its inclusion in 2021 on the UNESCO World Heritage List, as one of the main European spa towns, has acted as a kind of redemption for the local population - even if Peten's ghost will forever hover over the spacious main square where his office was.
Mr. Malure is above all a pragmatist. If Marxism brought economic ruin and China’s opening up to the market rapidly developed the country, he knew which side he was on. When Doctors Without Borders was on the verge of financial collapse in the late 1970s, he clashed with one of the organization’s founders, the romanticized visionary Bernard Kouchner, who had an idealistic vision for its future. A wildly successful fundraising campaign led to Malure taking over the organization, giving it more power to save lives.
Asked about the conflict, Bernard Kouchner, the former foreign minister, said: “I founded it. He developed it. He has talent and a certain brilliance.”
In his later years, Mr. Malure, married and the father of two grown children, likes to return to Više whenever he can, to enjoy the “sweetness of life, which today’s world sometimes lacks.” Yet now he faces a threatening world he did not expect. He thought the lessons of history had been learned in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed shortly after. Freedom and liberal democracy seemed victorious then.
But the pendulum has swung again, the autocrats are back, and the far right and far left have caused paralysis in the French National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, and he is now rubbing his eyes in disbelief.
“I don’t think we’re going to see an autocratic, illiberal regime in the United States, that would be a surprise, but I didn’t think it would happen in some European countries, maybe even in France,” Mr. Malure said, alluding to Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary and the rise of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party.
When I asked why he thought a French senator’s words about Trump had such a strong global resonance, he replied: “Never before,” Mr. Malure said in his speech, “has a president issued so many illegal decrees, fired judges who could have stood in his way, dismissed the entire military leadership in one fell swoop, weakened all mechanisms of control, and seized control of social media. This is not just an illiberal deviation. This is the beginning of the usurpation of democracy.”
Mr. Malure was silent for a moment, then said:
"Republicans are scared, Democrats are caught off guard and without a real leader, but I can't imagine there won't be a reaction. The American people are facing one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century - a challenge equal to the one the French faced in 1940, when they had to decide whether to join the Resistance or not."
The text is taken from the "New York Times"
Translation: NB
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